The Homesite Quote Conversion competition asked the Kaggle community to predict which customers would purchase a quoted insurance plan in order to help Homesite to better understand the impact of proposed pricing changes and maintain an ideal portfolio of customer segments. The 1764 competing teams faced an anonymized dataset with around 250k training samples in almost 300 dimensions. They were challenged to predict the probability a customer would purchase an insurance plan given a quote. Team KazAnova | Faron | clobber managed to win a head-to-head race at the end and finished in 1st place.

Our Team

Marios Michailidis | KazAnova is Manager of Data Science at dunnhumby and part-time PhD student in machine learning at University College London (UCL) with a focus on improving recommender systems. He has worked in both marketing and credit sectors in the UK and has led many analytics projects with various themes including acquisition, retention, uplift, fraud detection and portfolio optimization. In his spare time he has created KazAnova GUI for credit scoring. Marios has 70 Kaggle competitions on his turtle shell and started competing on Kaggle to find new challenges and to learn from the best.

Mathias Müller | Faron holds an AI & ML focused Diplom (eq. MSc.) in Computer Science from Humboldt University of Berlin. He tinkered with computer vision in the context of bio-inspired visual navigation of autonomous flying quadrocopters during his studies. Currently, he is working as a ML-Engineer for FSD in the automotive sector. Mathias stumbled upon Kaggle while looking for a more ML-focused platform compared to TopCoder, where he entered his first predictive modeling competition. Besides, he likes to contribute to the amazing XGBoost.

Ning Situ | clobber is a Software-Engineer at Microsoft. He is currently working on a real-time data processing system hosted on Cassandra. Ning obtained his PhD in Computer Science from University of Houston for doing research in melanoma recognition and considers Kaggle a wonderful place to gain knowledge in Data Science through real projects.

to build a pool of around 500 base models from which we selected about 125 for ensembling. Our final ensemble
consists of 3 meta layers. It achieves a public leaderboard AUC of 0.97062 and a private leaderboard AUC of 0.97024:

Fig. 1: Final Ensemble

Data Preprocessing & Feature Engineering

This dataset required hardly any cleaning and we encoded the provided data in many different ways in order to illuminate the input space as much as possible:

Categorical ⇒ ID per category

Categorical ⇒ value count for each category

Categorical ⇒ out-of-fold likelihood for each category with respect to the target attribute

Categorical ⇒ one-hot encoding

Numerical ⇒ as is

Numerical ⇒ percentile transformation

One-hot encodings and value counts of all features with distinct values below a threshold

Regarding feature engineering, we extracted year, month, day & weekday out of Original_Quote_Date, explored summary statistics and 2-, 3- & 4-way feature interactions (sums, differences, products and quotients). The search for the latter was initiated due to the positive effect of the "golden features" (differences of highly correlated features) used in the "Keras around 0.9633*" public script. We searched interaction candidates either by simple target correlation checks or through logistic regression and XGBoost as wrappers. The space of possible 2-way interactions was searched exhaustively and random searches with adjusted sampling probabilities based on feature rankings were used to find higher-order interactions. Afterwards, we applied the feature selection methods described below to the most promising candidates. Feature interactions helped to get diverse as well as better performing models, which added significant value to our ensemble.

Fig. 2: Search for feature interactions with XGBoost as wrapper

Feature Ranking & Subset Selection

Feature subset selection turned out to be useful to increase both single model performance and diversity. It was also playing an important role during our meta modeling. We applied and combined a variety of wrapper and embedded methods to rank the features of the base and meta levels:

Single Feature AUC: by training a model like XGBoost on each feature seperately or calculating gini coefficients on binned versions of the features.

Fig. 3: Example of single feature scoring

XGBoost: we used Xgbfi to rank the features by different metrics like FScore, wFScore, Gain and ExpectedGain (see Fig. 4).

Fig. 4: Feature ranking metrics regarding XGBoost

Noise Injection: we replaced features by noise or added noise to the features after model training and monitored the impact on the validation errors.

Fig. 5: Noise injection in order to detect unimportant features

Modeling

We started with building some marginally tuned models and constructed our meta modeling early on to get an idea about what adds diversity and to optimize the ensemble performance alongside. Neural networks have been the best performing stackers, followed by XGBoost and logistic regression. Besides, XGBoost and logistic regression showed to be considerably more sensitive to feature selection at the meta levels than neural networks. In general, it turned out to be more useful to train on many different combinations of feature subsets and feature representations than to tune hyperparameters, which is why several (base) models share the same parameter settings.

Our best base model (XGBoost) emerged from feature subset selection and utilization of feature interactions and scores Top15 at the private leaderboard. Regarding public leadboard scores,
we got the following ranking of algorithms at the base level:

Around 20% of our selected base models were "sub-models" - trained on different partitions of the data specified by feature values (e.g. one model per weekday). We used KazAnova GUI's optimized binning based on Weights of Evidence (WOE) and Information Value (IV) to ensure sufficiently large data partitions for features with higher cardinality of distinct values like GeographicField6B:

Fig. 6: Binning of GeographicField6B

Other Things ... which added diversity or increased single model performance:

Cross Validation

We were using 5-fold stratified cross validation during the whole competition with a small set of seeds for the base models. At first, our meta models were tuned on fixed-seeded folds for the sake of having a common reference, but we were forced to avoid this seed later in the competition once we realized that we had overused it. After that we continued to train our models on different seeds and we sampled different seeded 5-folds out of our oof-predictions in order to compare the scores of the folds the models had been trained on and other folds. Our best public LB submission (0.97065) showed some irregularities with respect to these analyses and therefore we did not select it for final evaluation.

We also took the public leaderboard scores as additional source of information into account and checked for a pair of submissions, whether the observed public LB score difference matched the AUC variations between the local folds of these two submissions. This helped us to identify inconsistencies: In general, an improvement of the CV-mean did not imply AUC improvements on all 5 folds. We saw absolute AUC differences up to 0.000085 for a single fold between two submissions with the same CV-mean. Besides, each fold had a slightly different correlation to the public LB score. We hit a suspicious looking plateau around the LB score of 0.97025, which did not match the normal pattern between AUC changes of our local folds and the public LB score. In fact, it turned out to be caused by a bug in our sources, leading to faulty calculations of 3-way interactions for the test data.

Fig. 7: Suspicious plateau around the LB score of 0.97025

Marios' Corner: Some Tips Regarding Cross Validation

Reliable cross validation, detection of tiny inconsistencies and dealing with serious overfitting issues have probably been the most important ingredients in our solution. So I thought this post would be a good place to share some aspects that I have been considering useful over my past 70+ Kaggle competitions to set up a reliable CV:

Stratified k-fold. Unless the dataset you are being tested on (e.g the test set ) is in future period, then most of the times use random stratified k-fold - it seems to work well. However, if the test data is in the future - and time seems to be an important factor like in stock marker or store sales - then you need to formulate your CV process to always train on past data and test on future data (e.g. do a time split).

Treat your CV like your test data. That means if there is something that you cannot know or do for your test data, then you have to treat the validation data as if you don't know it too.Example: Let's say you run a neural net (that is easy to overfit / underfit) and you use the validation data to determine at which exact epoch to stop the training and you check the performance for the same validation data. Can you use the test data to know when to stop the training? No, you can't, because you don't know the labels for the test data. Hence it is invalid to use this for validation. Instead, you could use a fixed amount of epochs that works well on average for all your folds. From my perspective, the best way to do that would be to split your training data into 3 parts when you do CV and use them

to train the model,

to validate when to stop the training,

to see the performance on a real holdout set.

Generally always keep in mind that you need to treat your validation data as much as you can as your test data (e.g. like you don't know the labels), otherwise you may overfit.

Always test against the metric you are being tested on. If it is AUC, then AUC. If it is RMSE, then RMSE and so on.

Model type and size of dataset. It is more difficult to overfit with 500,000 rows versus with 10,000 rows. If you have less than 400-300, you are kind of doomed! From my experience, it is difficult to form a reliable CV process with so little data. All neural nets are more prone to overfitting than linear models.

Test your CV. Sacrifice a couple of submissions to see whether you got it right. Once you formulated your CV, test it! Bear in mind for anything less than 5,000 rows (empirically), big variations have to be expected (e.g. you might improve in CV, but not on public leaderboard).

Don't overtune your models. For example, when you run logistic regression and you try to find the best value for regularization and your C becomes 1.02412353563, you are definitely overfitting! Do sizable increases/decreases of your hyperparameters. For example, try C=1.2, then C=1.4, then 1.6 and so on.

Get intuition from your hyper parameters. Try to see if changes of the hyperparameters yield meaningful results. Most of the times, the hyperparameters have a peak performance for a specific value. Let’s say the more you increase C in logistic regression the better the performance for your metric becomes. However that is only true until C reaches 2.0 (for example). After that, further increases in C decreases performance. If you don't encounter something like that, or for some reason the best value of your hyperparameter has many peaks, this most of the times indicates a problem regarding your CV.

You can always put more size in your validation. If there is too much volatility in your results, increase you validation size. Bagging helps a lot too to stabilize your results (at the cost of more time though).